


Aftereffect

by MagnificentAndStrange



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Gen Fic, Harry Potter AU, Harry is a young adult, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, No romantic pairings - Freeform, Post-Hogwarts, Severus Snape Lives, Snape doing whatever he can to protect Harry and keep him alive, hurt!harry, implied hurt!snape, late autumn, snape is a mentor figure to harry, thunderstorm, tri-writing tournament: round two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 21:09:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21186029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagnificentAndStrange/pseuds/MagnificentAndStrange
Summary: “Yeah, I get it,” Harry said raggedly, looking away from Snape’s fierce gaze, “I just…it’s not safe for you to do that. I could hurt you when I’m like this – Ihavehurt you before.”Snape jerked his head in a dismissive gesture, “hardly more than a few bruises, Potter. I can’t expect you to recognize me when you are in this sort of state, you don’t even recognize yourself. Occlumancy is the only solution to drawing you out of your suffering. I will not argue with you about it again.”“You could die,” Harry protested quietly, looking up at the man and feeling the edges of the wooden chair press into his thin shoulders and back, “I’m not a child anymore, Snape, I know that this could kill you.”“Then it kills me,” Snape responded flatly.





	Aftereffect

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Potions and Snitches Tri-Writing Tournament: Round Two

_Let us as we have seen see_  
_ doom’s integration………….a wind has blown the rain_

_away and the leaves and the sky and the_  
_ trees stand:_  
_ the trees stand. The trees,_  
_ suddenly wait against the moon’s face._

\- e.e. cummings

The rattle of glass panes woke Harry, the sound clawing a hazy memory to formation of something lost, broken when he was very young and his fear of crying, of the punishment that came when he asked for comfort. Just as suddenly the memory disappeared, his muscles tensing as alertness came and with it the knowledge that someone else was in the room with him.

He wasn’t quite awake as he moved, rolling sharply to the side, nearly off the edge of his bed, hooking fingers around the underside of the bed-frame and whipping out the spare wand he always kept hidden nearby, and casting a curse without active knowledge of what he was incanting. The spell rebounded, shattering something in his room and Harry flinched instinctively at the sound, staring wildly at the dark shape that unfolded itself from a chair, having effortlessly blocked his curse.

“Reckless as always, Potter,” the tall thin shape remarked quietly and Harry shook his head wordlessly, the person near enough to identify by voice.

The adrenaline rushing through him vanished and Harry sat back, panting, the room spinning. A heavy wind was roaring outside, shaking the window and he flinched again,

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, more out of exhaustion than anything else. He fumbled for his glasses, not realizing that Snape was holding them out to him until the man spoke,

“What I’m always doing here, Potter, ensuring that you’re still alive.”

Harry carefully slid his glasses on, aware that the frames felt loose around his face again. He looked down at the tangled sheets, avoiding Snape’s eyes. The steady thrum of pain running through him made it difficult to concentrate on anything. He took a deep breath, trying to mentally distance himself from it until the pain became only a residual ache inside him. His lungs contracted oddly at first, his limbs shaking with the effort of staying focused on the room in front of him.

It didn’t surprise him to see that he was still wearing the robes of an Auror or that the cloth was stained darker in areas where blood had dried. Covertly, he checked his wrists, startled at the visible bones there but relieved the white scars etched across the pale skin of his forearms were not recent. He never remembered much of these moments, never knew if his madness ran hours or days.

“You have not been taking the potions I gave you,” Snape said and Harry pushed a hand through his black unruly hair, wincing as he felt bruising along his scalp. The window shuddered at the force of the wind outside and Harry looked up, relieved that his blurred vision had mostly returned to normal.

“They don’t work,” he replied hoarsely and Snape frowned, crossing arms over his long black robes.

It was strange that no matter how many times Harry woke up in his own house with Snape standing over him, demanding he keep fighting whatever the hell was wrong with him, Snape could still make him feel like a fourth-year all over again – as if Harry wasn’t in his mid-twenties now, as if Voldemort’s return and death hadn’t happened at all.

“You need to give it more time, Potter,” Snape said, his voice not quite as clipped as usual, his dark eyes accessing. Harry looked away, focusing on the constant pain rather than Snape. It must have been bad this time if the other man was so openly concerned.

“I didn’t –“ he hesitated, gripping his knees, “I didn’t – at work…”

Snape seemed used to the times where the illness momentarily took away Harry’s ability to speak coherently, enough now to know what he meant anyway.

“No, nothing happened at the Ministry. You contacted me when the first symptoms started, then you flooed here.” His expression darkened suddenly and he looked sharply at Harry, his thin mouth twisting in a scowl, “I’ve told you time and time again not to floo when ill, you know that magical travel worsens your condition.”

Harry shook his head, edging toward the foot of his bed and trying to decide if he had the strength to stand on his own and if his body would remember how to.

“I couldn’t stay there,” he mumbled, glaring at Snape when the man sneered at his answer, “what did you want me to do?” he demanded suddenly, frustration overtaking gratitude for Snape saving him, again, “I can’t let this happen in front of the Auror department. It’s bad enough that we don’t even know what the hell this illness is, I’m not going to try to explain it to the entire wizarding world when I don’t even remember it half the time!”

_But I do remember_, he thought with a chill. They were brief moments but they were there, floating through his mind, terrifying him when he recalled them. He’d rather be outside, letting the cold wind lash him to pieces than remember what he was like during an attack. The complete loss of control, the terrible pain, wanting to die, to just end everything. It was almost worse remembering Snape’s reactions then and the way the seemingly emotionless man would be consumed with fear every time Harry slipped deeper into the pain. No it was better to forget everything than to remember Snape afraid and struggling to bring him back from the blackness that threatened to swallow them both.

“How much time did I lose?” he asked, suddenly ashamed of his anger and aware that Snape looked as exhausted as Harry felt. The older man’s face was chalky white in the dark room, shadows visible under his obsidian-colored eyes.

“Almost a fortnight,” Snape answered after a moment and Harry swore, closing his eyes.

It was getting worse then, a lot worse. He bit the inside of his cheek as pain flashed through his mind, settling in his bones. When he opened his eyes, Snape was watching him, tracking whatever signs he used to tell how bad Harry’s pain level was.

“You can’t do that,” Harry said, voice unsteady as he tried to stand and nearly fell. Snape gripped him by the elbow and Harry shook his head, forcing himself to sound firm and not like Snape was the only thing holding him upright, “you can’t keep using Occlumency like that, not for that long, not to protect me from- from whatever this is.”

“I suggest you do not tell me what I can or cannot do, Potter,” Snape hissed, black eyes narrowed as he steered Harry to the chair he’d been sitting in earlier. He glared at the younger man, his thick black hair falling loose down his shoulders from where he’d let it go unwashed and uncut for ages, “your mind is not able to withstand this, not without shields which you are incapable of forming due to the destruction of the horcrux within you. I’ve explained this matter to you numerous times.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Harry said raggedly, looking away from Snape’s fierce gaze, “I just…it’s not safe for you to do that. I could hurt you when I’m like this – I _have_ hurt you before.”

Snape jerked his head in a dismissive gesture, “hardly more than a few bruises, Potter. I can’t expect you to recognize me when you are in this sort of state, you don’t even recognize yourself. Occlumency is the only solution to drawing you out of your suffering. I will not argue with you about it again.”

“You could die,” Harry protested quietly, looking up at the man and feeling the edges of the wooden chair press into his thin shoulders and back, “I’m not a child anymore, Snape, I know that this could kill you.”

“Then it kills me,” Snape responded flatly, before straightening up and waving his wand toward the corner of the room where broken ceramic pieces flew together to reform the lamp that must have shattered from Harry’s spellwork earlier.

“But –“ Harry began and Snape swung around, black robes billowing.

“This is my choice, Harry!” he snapped, his dark eyes gleaming in the flickering lamplight, “I am here because I choose to be here, I choose to administer you potions, to protect your mind with my own, to prevent you from killing yourself. I choose to lie to help you keep your job and to prevent your friends from knowing how ill you are. I am doing this because I think it may be the only way to save you and you will let me do this and not feel whatever guilt or pride it is that prevents you from accepting help!”

The only sound was the steady rattling of the window glass and at Harry’s sudden shiver, Snape summoned a blanket from the bed and thrust it at Harry. Harry lifted a hand shakily, feeling the woolen fibers of the blanket – knitted by Mrs. Weasley – he recalled distantly, but his fingers stayed open, suddenly unable to remember the mechanism of how to grasp something. The shaking was growing worse and Snape gently wrapped the blanket around him, turning Harry’s thin wrist in one hand and carefully showing him the motion of how to open and close fingers that were stiff with pain.

“This is not your fault,” he said roughly, dark eyes searching Harry’s tired green ones, willing the younger man to believe him.

* * *

By nightfall, Harry had recovered well enough to walk unaided and to be left alone without having to worry about his limbs forgetting how to move. He stepped carefully out of the shower, dressing slowly, too exhausted to think about anything other than going back to bed. His wet hair dripped into his eyes and he pushed it aside, wondering if he could get Snape to cut it for him. He wasn’t sure he was recovered enough to grip scissors and Snape was already quite used to looking after him when an attack happened.

Harry exhaled heavily, knotting the drawstring of his pajama trousers tighter around his narrow waist. His limbs were skeletal, uncoordinated and shivering. Dark bruising spread along his arms and chest. He had no memory of where the marks came from, or if Snape had to restrain him to keep him from killing himself when the pain was bad. Sometimes it was better not to know and a part of him that was still very much Harry from a time before magic, Harry from the Cupboard, agreed with him.

Harry looked up, grimacing at the sight of himself in the mirror on the opposite wall. His cheeks were hollowed, his pale face as thin as it had been years ago when hiding in the woods with Ron and Hermione, looking for horcruxes and not knowing then that he had had one inside of him the entire time. His green eyes looked the same as they always did after an attack, almost too vividly bright, too lost in the pain the rest of him was conditioned since childhood not to show.

Snape must have shaved him earlier, Harry thought absently, running a bony hand over his jaw where he could feel the rough texture just starting to come back. If things progressed as they usually did, than Harry would be well enough to do the task himself tomorrow before hopefully being able to return to work.

Since this had started, Snape had taken it upon himself to find ways to explain Harry’s lengthy absences from the Ministry while all the while keeping his own presence in Harry’s life concealed. It was only after the fourth attack that Harry had learned that when the illness started to fade and he no longer needed to be watched so closely Snape would act in his stead, fielding letters from the Ministry or Harry’s friends and forging Harry’s signature whenever he needed to. It was also Snape who briefed him on any confidential Auror information that Harry had missed during an attack, information Snape shouldn’t have known and yet found out with the ease of someone who had been actively involved in espionage for over twenty-five years.

* * *

The moon was almost full that night, the faint light of it spilling into the cold sitting room of his house. Harry stumbled a bit at the door entrance, and Snape’s voice came across the dark room from where he sat in a high-back chair drawn up near the window,

“There’s a step down and sixteen across,”

Harry remembered but was grateful nonetheless that Snape didn’t turn on the light. The lights in the sitting room were still muggle fixtures he had had yet to get rid of and they were far brighter than his vision could stand the first few hours after an attack. The house shuddered in the wind howling outside as Harry made his way carefully to Snape, dropping into the armchair across from the man.

Both of them turned their heads to watch the night storm as grass and leaves ripped loose and slashed against the window. The moonlight displayed the carnage outside in strange detail where tree limbs fallen over in the back garden were inky silhouettes against the rushing dark sky. The wind hungrily stripped the late autumnal leaves from branches, flashes of lightning coming from far away as rain blew in horizontal bursts against the house. It was terrible and transfixing, neither speaking for a long time, Snape’s voice echoing in the stillness when he finally did.

“I am not sure if the potions will counteract what the horcrux has already done,”

“I know,” Harry said quietly, leaning his head back in his chair and watching as a small tree from the garden crashed down, the windows vibrating, “Dumbledore once said that no one’s ever made a person into a horcrux before, there’s no research for what to do about it.”

“The horcrux is gone,” Snape responded distantly, brief pain crossing his face at the mention of Dumbledore, “unknowingly, Voldemort created it and unknowingly he destroyed it when you faced him in the Forbidden Forest seven years ago. However,” he looked over at Harry, “it has left a hole within your mind, a wound almost.”

“Yes,” Harry whispered, “I can feel it.”

The moonlight fractured before them as leaves tore by, the gale shaking the house once more. Cold wind whistled through cracks around the door and windows. Harry shivered, pulling his knees up and settling into the chair as if he were still a small child.

“What is it like for you?” he asked suddenly, “exposing your mind to that, when I’m…you know, not stable.”

He found it hard to meet Snape’s eyes, to see the man looking closely at him now, to watch how the moonlight broke apart and reformed, pulling Snape’s features in and out of shadow.

“There is pain,” Snape stated after a pause, his voice almost gentle, “ and there are memories.”

“Do you ever see Voldemort?” Harry questioned, looking down at the worn cuffs of his overlarge shirt, fingers absently tracing a yellowing bruise on the top of his left bare foot that he could not remember getting.

“I see you,” Snape answered, his eyes back on the storm now, his gaze distant once more, “you, when you were very young.”

Harry bit his lip, looking at the shaking window. He knew that there wasn’t any way to keep Snape from seeing his memories during the times the man used Occlumency when an attack happened. He didn’t mind like he had all those years ago when Snape had first seen glimpses of his past. But still it was difficult to talk about. Snape had seen loads more about him than anyone else knew, especially when it came to Harry’s life at the Dursleys. Even the dark memories that weren’t clear in Harry’s mind, the beatings, the cruel punishments, the cupboard day after day, Snape saw all of that and he had never once retreated from it or from whatever else happened during an attack.

“What day is it?” Harry asked as Snape stood. The older man paused, his exhaustion visible in his stance even as his expression remained unreadable in the darkness.

“Halloween.”

Harry swallowed tightly, memories of his parents’ deaths flashing through his mind as sudden and untraceable as the lightning outside. He leaned his head back against the chair, a mirthless sound leaving him, lost in the noise of leaves and twigs hitting the window.

“Fitting,” he said finally and his former professor raised an eyebrow, unexpectedly reaching out and lightly resting a hand comfortingly on Harry’s shoulder for a brief moment.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Snape replied quietly.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a fic where Harry is older (24 actually) because I think it’s important to show that people still need help when they are adults and that having Snape there, protecting him, is still very valued by Harry. Also, I liked the idea that the destruction of the horcrux does have consequences, that maybe things were fine for awhile but by now the removal of another person’s soul, which Harry had in him for over a decade and a half, is starting to affect things. It really wasn’t my intention to write another vague open-ended AU ficlet, but somehow this one just felt right to start and end where it did. So to clarify, Harry is suffering strange bouts of illness where he is in so much pain that he is suicidal and unhinged. The only reason Harry hasn’t gone completely insane or killed himself is because Snape is using Occlumency to shield Harry’s mind from the majority of the ‘attack’. As Harry points out, this is dangerous for Snape as well and there is a high risk that Snape could die every time he pulls Harry back from the brink of death. I really am considering either expanding on this idea in a sequel or a different fic altogether set during Harry’s hogwarts years that will not leave off in the middle of things, so to speak. :) Hope you enjoyed reading!


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